Author(s): A Jemimah

Abstract: Stephen King, often relegated to the category of popular horror, uses the genre to explore profound psychological terrors, particularly those rooted in the domestic sphere. In The Shining (1977) and Misery (1987), King masterfully transforms the traditional sanctuary of the home into a claustrophobic prison, using this physical entrapment to explore the disintegration of the protagonist’s psyche. This paper traces how Annie Wilkes’s house in Misery and the Overlook Hotel in The Shining operate as Gothic domestic prisons, deforming caregiving and family roles, and how the protagonists’ psyches respond to, resist, or finally succumb to these pressures. The House becomes prison, and the psyche becomes the battleground. The architecture, isolation, control, and obsession combine to trap protagonists. The house or the hotel is never neutral: it becomes a character, a force, and a prison. Through the Overlook Hotel and Annie Wilkes’s secluded home, King examines how isolation, external monstrous forces, and internal trauma conspire to dismantle identity, autonomy, and sanity, rendering the familiar home a site of ultimate horror.

Keywords: Domestic Entrapment, Control, Gothic, Home, Isolation, Psychological Prison.

Article Info: Received: 08 Mar 2026; Received in revised form: 05 Apr 2026; Accepted: 10 Apr 2026; Available online: 15 Apr 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.112.71